"Aaron has been depressed about his
case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through
was this painful," his
mother wrote this morning on Hacker News.
"Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to
the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the
things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss
him dearly. The grief is unfathomable."

Unfortunately Swartz is not the first startup founder to battle
depression. Last year there was a similar gut-wrenching story
about Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old
co-founder of Diaspora who took his own life.

Swartz made a huge impact on the Internet community. He created
one of two startups
that combined to form Reddit. Before Reddit, when he was 14,
Swartz co-wrote RSS 1.0. He also co-founded an advocacy group
called DemandProgress, which encouraged people to take action
when news affected them. He did a lot to stop the SOPA and PIPA
bills too (see video below).

In September, Swartz wrote one of the final posts on his blog
titled Lean Into
The Pain. It's an inspiring article about how to deal with
both mental and physical hardships. Here's an excerpt:

When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not
wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if
your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing
it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more
painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you
often feel exhausted and sore. And the next morning it’s even
worse.

If that was all that happened, you’d probably never do it. It’s
not that much fun being sore. Yet we do it anyway — because we
know that, in the long run, the pain will make us stronger. Next
time we’ll be able to run harder and lift more before the pain
starts.

And knowing this makes all the difference. Indeed, we come to see the pain as a sort of
pleasure — it feels good to really push yourself, to fight
through the pain and make yourself stronger. Feel the burn! It’s
fun to wake up sore the next morning, because you know that’s
just a sign that you’re getting stronger.

Few people realize it, but psychological pain works the same way.
Most people treat psychological pain like the hot stove — if
starting to think about something scares them or stresses them
out, they quickly stop thinking about it and change the subject.

The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to
be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the
projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most
about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our
future, the most dangerous risks that we run. We’re scared of
them because we know the stakes are so high. But if we never
think about them, then we can never do anything about them.

It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to
push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain
strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing
problems head-on, or in any other way. Nature gave us pain as a
messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we
have exceeded, our limits in some way. At the same time, nature
made the process of getting stronger require us to push our
limits. Gaining strength is the adaptation process of the body
and the mind to encountering one’s limits, which is painful. In
other words, both pain and strength typically result from
encountering one’s barriers. When we encounter pain, we are at
an important juncture in our decision-making process.1

Yes it’s painful, but the trick is to make that mental shift. To
realize that the pain isn’t something awful to be postponed and
avoided, but a signal that you’re getting stronger — something to
savor and enjoy. It’s what makes you better.

Pretty soon, when you start noticing something that causes you
psychic pain, you’ll get excited about it, not afraid. Ooh,
another chance to get stronger. You’ll seek out things
you’re scared of and intentionally confront them, because it’s an
easy way to get the great rewards of self-improvement. Dalio
suggests thinking of each one as a puzzle, inside of which is
embedded a beautiful gem. If you fight through the pain to solve
the puzzle, you unlock it and get to keep the gem.

The trick is: when you start feeling that psychological pain
coming on, don’t draw back from it and cower — lean into it. Lean
into the pain.